


Bedlam Girls

by kitsunealyc



Category: Changeling: the Dreaming
Genre: Cutting, Gen, Mental Institutions, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 00:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunealyc/pseuds/kitsunealyc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shara is perfectly sane, for certain values of the term.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedlam Girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalirush](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalirush/gifts), [DarkDanc3r](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkDanc3r/gifts).



_For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam  
Ten-thousand miles I've travelled.  
Mad-Maudlin goes on dirty toes  
for to save her shoes from gravel_

 

"What are you in for?"

The whisper came during art therapy, when Shara should have been painting out her frustration. Instead, she stared out the window, wishing she could see more of the world outside than the lawn and the whitewashed institutional wall and the trees and the sky. Her feet itched to be anywhere but here.

She tore her gaze away from freedom to look at the speaker – a long, thin wisp of a girl. A stiff breeze might send her tumbling out of the art room and back down the corridor.

Shara shrugged and chalked a streak of fuchsia across her canvas. At least, she expected it to be fuchsia. The chalk faded to a drab non-color somewhere between brown and grey. The same color as the walls and the floor and the world.

"Pathological liar." It was a lie. They kept changing her diagnosis. "You?"

"Depression." The slender girl held up her arms. Her wrists were all bone and tendon and pale skin crisscrossed with pink scars, like some kind of modern-primitive version of Victorian lace gloves.

Shara took out a bit of charcoal to sketch the oddly pretty effect. Black was black and white was white. At least those colors wouldn't fade to drab. "I would have marked you for anorexia."

"That was the place before this one." The girl slid around to Shara's other side, wedging herself into the space between the easel and the window.

"That's me." She cocked her head at the shadows emerging from the canvas. "You made me pretty."

"Nature made you pretty. I'm making you interesting."

"Oh." A tremor of a smile curved her lips. She ducked her head, and her dark hair slid forward to hide the smile.

Shara paused and glared at the portrait. The charcoal crumbled in her fingers. Black and white couldn't be the only colors in the world. She knew there'd been others, once upon a time.

"It's a lie." She refused to whisper, couldn't bear to self-silence the way the anorexic cutter had. Dr. Kerevan, the art therapist, waved for two of the orderlies. They circled around the other patients, heading for Shara.

"It's all a fucking lie," Shara screamed. She ripped the paper from the easel, crumpling it up and throwing it at the approaching orderlies. "Get back!"

She grabbed the easel and hopped atop a table, brandishing the legs of the tripod before her like a weapon. She wasn't a troubled girl tucked away in a mental facility by parents whose lives were too well-ordered to be disrupted. She was…

A lion tamer! In a circus! Her lions had broken free and were coming for her. The only things that stood between Shara the Bold and certain devouring were the ancient tools of her trade. Her trusty chair and…

"I need my whip," she shouted at her pale assistant – poor girl, dying of consumption yet never raising a complaint. The girl cowered in the shadows, no match for the lions. She shook her head.

Damn consumptives. Impossible to find good help these days. "Back! Back!" Shara thrust her chair at the circling lions. The crowd of circus-goers watched from their seats in hushed awe, never knowing this wasn't part of the act.

One of the lions tore her chair away while she was distracted by the crowd, the other pounced on her from behind.

"The lions are gonna eat me," Shara shouted as they dragged her back to their den. "Get away while you can!"

Her last sight as they wrestled her around the corner was of her lovely assistant pressed against the doorframe, eyes wide with wonder.

***

 _The night wind is my ally,  
And the highland mists do hide me,  
When the bane-sidhe wail, and the clansmen quail,  
and the pwca run beside me_

"You escaped the lions."

The whisper jolted Shara awake. She peered into the dark corners of her room. There were always too many dark corners, but she checked them as best she could. Nothing.

She must have imagined the voice. She did that a lot.

"How did you escape the lions?"

Shara's imagination wasn't _that_ good. She looked up.

A pale face pressed against the air vent, all wide eyes and delicate brows and thin lips.

"How did you get up there?" Shara climbed up on her bed, reaching for the vent. Long, bony fingers slid through the gaps to touch Shara's fingers in greeting.

"The air ducts. I'm skinny enough to crawl through them. It makes this place bearable, being able to hide and listen and learn secrets. You would not believe what naughty things Nurse Patty does in the girl's bathroom." A slither from the tiles above, as the girl wiggled to see Shara better. "So, how did you escape the lions?"

Shara pulled her hand back, fingers curling into a fist. "There weren't any lions," she said, repeating what the doctors and orderlies told her as they strapped her down and drugged her to quiescence. "It was all in my head."

"But there were. I saw them."

Shara froze, cringed away from the vent. She didn't want to hear that, didn't want to be crazy. Not if it meant being trapped in places like this for the rest of her life. "That's not possible," she whispered, voice almost as low as the skinny girl's.

"I did. The orderlies, they turned into lions, and you were a lion-tamer, and we were in a circus. Dr. Kerevan was the ringmaster. That boy who eats all the paste was a clown." The girl pressed her face harder against the grating. "I'm sorry I couldn't find your whip."

"That's… okay." The girl had seen it. Seen details she couldn't have known unless there was something really there. Something that could be seen and known. Did that mean the lies were true? That maybe Shara wasn't crazy?

Shara reached up again. Her fingers could barely fit through the gaps in the vent, but she managed to touch the girl's cheek. She was real, too.

"I'm Shara. What's your name?"

That smile again, tentative as a whisper. "Lys."

***

 _Went down to Satan's kitchen  
for to get my food one morning,  
and there I got souls piping hot  
all on the spit a-turning_

"We need to get out of here." Shara gazed out the common room window to the wide world beyond. The world of freedom. No unsightly bars marred the face of the Institute. The cage was worked right into the glass, a mesh of iron filaments as fine as the lace of scars covering Lys' forearms.

"How?" Lys perched at her side, limbs bent at acute angles that made Shara's bones ache just to look at them.

Shara shrugged. "Stage a prison revolt? Set off the alarms? Call in a bomb threat? Release the Kraken?"

"Sounds noisy."

"You have a better idea?"

"We could sneak out."

"Through locked doors?"

A moment of silence, then Lys' most tentative whisper. "I could sneak into the security office. Through the vents. Get the keys. Easy."

"If it's so easy, why haven't you done it before?"

"Where would I go? Who would I go with?" And then, so quiet Shara had to strain to hear. "They never leave the room. There's always someone inside."

Shara sat up a little straighter. Guards. She knew how to deal with guards. Indiana Jones had taught her. "What you need is a distraction."

Lys smiled and ducked her head, that dark hair sliding forward to hide her blush. "Something… noisy?"

"No." Shara hopped up, the spring returning to her step. It had been so long, she'd forgotten it used to be there. "Something _dramatic._ "

***

 _My staff has murdered giants,  
and my bag a long-knife carries  
for to cut mince pies from children's thighs  
and feed them to the faeries_

"He's eating the paste. All the paste. You have to stop him. Oh, the humanity!"

Another orderly and nurse peeled off from the area around the ward desk, heading for the art therapy room and the paste-eating emergency.

"That used to be horses, you know," Shara called after them, all eagerness to be helpful.

That left only two more, the ward nurse and the head of security. Nurse Patty watched Shara with a frown.

"I'll just… sit quietly over here." Shara perched on the waiting bench opposite the ward desk and tried to look like she wasn't a troublemaker.

The Rube-Goldberg device of her distraction had taken some work to set up, but it was playing out perfectly. Jemmy really was eating all the paste, the cupboards opened up for him by a helpful Lys, who didn't need a key to break those locks. And over in the common room, half the other residents were engaged in a rousing game of Calvinball -- after Shara had explained the rules (or lack thereof) and organized the tournament.

That just left Nurse Patty and the last security guard. Lys had given Shara the key to getting rid of them.

"Also, I don't know if anyone has taken care of this yet, but somebody stuffed a pair of panties down the toilet in the bathroom. Red, lacy panties. I didn't think we were allowed to wear red, lacy panties."

Nurse Patty stiffened, florid face draining of color. She glanced back at the security guard as he emerged from his office.

He'd removed them with his _teeth,_ Lys had said. Shara bit down on a knowing grin and tried to look innocent.

"Where?" the guard asked, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. "The… women's bathroom?"

"Yup. The one down the hall. Last stall." Shara pointed, as if they didn't know exactly where the panties had come off.

Nurse Patty and the guard rushed off in that direction. In the shadows of the empty security office, something long and bony slithered down from the roof tiles. Shara sat back, whistling to herself.

A loud buzz and the click of electronic locks startled her. Shara sprang to her feet, backing up a few paces as Dr. Kerevan entered. He looked up from tucking away his key card.

"Shara? What are you doing out here?" His eyes flicked to the empty ward desk. "Where is everyone?"

Shara backed up another few steps. He followed, putting his back to the security office and Lys' frozen, deer-in-the-headlights pose.

She had to distract him. Think of a story. But Dr. Kerevan always knew when she was telling a story, no matter how convincing she made it. Her lies, he called them. He'd look at her with those grey, gimlet eyes, purse his lips, and he'd say, _Now Shara, you know insisting on these delusions impedes your recovery. Tell the truth._

She couldn't tell the truth. Not this time. And if she made a story, he'd drug her and restrain her and talk to her in that reasonable monotone until she believed herself that the true things she told were actually lies.

"I… came to tell them about Jemmy." That was true without being dangerous.

"What about Jemmy?"

"He's eating paste." Also true, though she was beginning to sweat.

"And why is Jemmy eating paste?"

Her heart beat so fast it tripped over itself. What could she say? The white of his lab coat against the charcoal of his suit burned her eyes with the contrast. Black and white. His world was black and white.

But it was still a world of stories.

"Well, popular opinion says it's related to some kind of vitamin deficiency, but Pica -- that's eating stuff that isn't usually supposed to be eaten -- can occur for a lot of reasons. There's no strong consensus as to why. In Jemmy's case, I think the problem stems from a paternal insistence on an overly-clean and controlled environment. Eating paste is Jemmy's way of lashing out and rebelling against the constriction of his upbringing.

Shara fell silent as the shadow in the security office slipped back up into the ceiling. Dr. Kerevan's jaw had gone slack.

"Will that be all, Dr. Kerevan?"

He rubbed his chin. "Er… yes, Shara. But maybe you should return to your room."

As long as they didn't strap her down. "Yes sir, Doctor, sir." She saluted and skipped back to her room.

Nightfall would be soon enough for their escape.

***

 _For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam  
Ten-thousand years I've travelled.  
Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes  
for to save her shoes from gravel._

"Where do we go now?" Lys' whisper put a pause in Shara's step. They'd hitched rides across the state, sometimes changing direction, leading any pursuit in a zig-zag path that was sure to confuse. Now they walked along a lonesome highway, waiting for another ride.

"I don't know!" Shara flung her arms wide, spinning about and kicking up gravel. "Isn't it great?"

Lys frowned and rubbed her arms. "Yeah. Great."

Shara paused in her exultation. Lys looked cold. And not-very-happy with the breadth of the starry sky above them, or the expanse of empty fields around them.

"Hey, back in some of the other places, the kids used to tell stories of a place for people like us. In the city. Not an institution. A safe place. I bet we could find it." Shara couldn't imagine wanting to stay anywhere for long, but maybe for just long enough to tell the tale of their daring escape.

And find Lys a decent coat. Something with a hood. Lys could rock a hood.

"In the city?" Lys perked up.

It was as much of a yes as Shara needed. She slung an arm about the other girl's shoulders to stave off her shivering. A place for people like them, people who understood that some secrets were worth keeping, and appreciated the truth within lies.

Shara stuck out her thumb as headlights crested over the road. "Lys, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

 

 _Still I sing mad boys, bonny mad boys,  
Bedlam boys are bonny.  
For they all go bare, and they live by the air,  
and they want no drink nor money._

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the excellent Russian_Blue for beta-reading.
> 
> I ran a Changeling troupe Larp with 60 or so players for about six years, so this was a fun chance to get to return to an old and very familiar playground. Lys and Shara never existed in the game, though I did yoink Jeffrey Kerevan (one of our major Dauntain villains) for this fic.


End file.
